Casey: Army needs reset and transformation

August 19, 2008

By Henry Kenyon

The U.S. Army is so consumed by the demands of the current fight that it cannot do the things that it is supposed to do, according to its highest-ranking officer. Gen. George W. Casey, USA, the U.S. Army chief of staff, charged that the service is badly out of whack because it has been caught between two worlds.

The United States "didn't have the Army we needed" after 9/11, Gen. Casey told a large crowd at today's plenary session. It has been transforming into the force it needs to be concurrent with combat operations around the globe, and that has not been a smooth process. Currently, the Army is about "70 percent there" in its drive to transform, the chief of staff claimed.

One thing the Army needs immediately is a systematic reset process, he emphasized. Troops that return from Iraq or Afghanistan incur substantial personnel and material costs. In terms of materiel, each rotation from those two countries costs about $70 billion to reset. Having a systematic reset process will help compel the force transformation into a true expeditionary army, he declared.